Obvious Sidekick – Chapter 2, Strip 304

If you have it rain, you might as well have it pour – and, thus, our (antagonistical) friend Klytoris also gets a little help down the road of realization, even if he was already briskly inching along on his own. Impressive, though – he had even begun to catch on to the name-spelled-backwards thing, and that puts him way ahead on the curve, at least as far as B-movie characters are concerned. Normally, nobody in a B-movie ever catches on to something like that, making a name spelled backwards a perfect alibi – without requiring an overabundance of ingenuity*. (Bucking the trend, a character in “Son of Dracula”immediately caught on to ‘Alucard’ being ‘Dracula’ backwards. It was still a perfect B-movie moment, though, because there never was any explanation how the character knew about the name ‘Dracula’ in the first place…)

On the issue of animals and loyality, I find it really touching how vulture seems to always stay beside Snuka’s body. It’s almost like on of those dogs you read about, staying beside their master’s dead body for days…OK, so vulture feeds off the body, but still…almost.

Captain Obvious considers Self-explanatory Lad a great sidekick, everything considered – if he would just stop always explaining himself at such length, he’d be perfect, even. On the other hand, he’s very popular with the ladies – at least those ladies that appreciate guys that are able to talk about their emotions. Unfortunately, Self-explanatory Lad can draw only limited advantage from that kind of popularity – as a member of the American Superheroic Sidekicks and Assistants Troop, he’s not allowed to experience any form of sexual attraction and/or possess external procreative organs.

On a sidenote, no, Snuka did not forge a fake driver’s license – that a real one in panel three! See, Sheriff Ketchum needed some form of crime-fighting success for his re-election campaign. So he figured that, if he just started handing out driver’s licenses to minors, he could cut down dramatically on instances of ID forgery, all without really having to leave his air-conditioned office. Sure, there was a bit of an uptick in drunk speeding incidents, but statistically, it was still one of his major law enforcement triumphs. (OK, one of his two major law enforcement triumphs. The other was cutting down on pet tax evasion by poisoning all the dog food at the local mall.)

*Adopting that guise entirely without thinking, however, is a somewhat risky proposition: